Most Inspiring Proven Hybrid ?

Found this site with links to several outfits around the world selling the NiFe batteries including prices. Cost numbers of the couple sites I checked looked pretty steep. The page also has some other interesting (useful?) information about the type. Site link:

http://www.nickel-iron-battery.com/

Seems like the major manufacturer's killed the type. Maybe because of their purported longevity? It would seem that like everthing else that if economies of scale were factored in they could be had fairly reasonably...

 

It seems as though the new retailers are still trying to kill them.Then again I've never bought legitimate deep cycle batteries before so it's hard to determine value.$4000 for 48 volts by 100 amps for 1 hour seems awfully expensive. If I get a chance to I'm going to get a lead acid comparison quote tomorrow.

All the contradictory information I getas I research in the local retail realm has my brain pretty scrambled.

I've been shopping for a new life for about a year now. I've decided to become a permanent student at the local University, taking one course per trimester. I've found a very awesome cafeteria to hang out in that's adjacent to the Physics people.It even has a Tipi out front. In between pottery and basket weaving classes I'll try to work the cafeteria zone for alternative thinkers that need some diversionary challenges. It seems that Physics people enjoy getting out of the box more than any other academic group. They also tend to be the most knowledgeable when it comes to real life technology and its success or failure in application. I don't plan to spend any real money on alternative technology until after thorough discussion in the physics realm. With a little luck and miraculous intervention I may be able to organize some joint research efforts in line with my goals.

 

Seems like the major manufacturer's killed the type. Maybe because of their purported longevity?

More likely they worry about a lack of maint , or the very dangerous chemicals inside.

Remember there is no level of stupidity by an operator that will not cause a law suit when some imbecile harms himself.

FF

 

Yesterday I spent 1/2 hour discussing solar application of Nickel Iron Batteries with a professional solar technology lecturer. He spent over 10 years selling them as his preferred choice for off grid solar homes. Despite internet claims that you can put any voltage you want into them he said a 12 volt system requires an 18 volt charge to obtain maximum efficiency and longevity. Due to heavy intermittent power usage combined with imperfect charging the battery banks he sold had a 10 to 12 year useful life.

Towards the end of the conversation he revealed that the batteries he sold here were 30 year old reconditioned products from a competitor in California.Once that factor came into the equation I wondered how valuable his 10 year experience was regarding the limitations and longevity of the Nickel Iron Batteries. The odds of the competitor selling the best reconditioned stock to him are probably nil.The other factor is how badly abused were the 30 year old batteries prior to reconditioning.

 

everyone keeps posting how these systems don't / cant work.
Well what about this boat, it has apparently been in service and charterable since 2004

http://www.catamarans.com/ElectricLagoon/multihulls_waypoint_article.asp

Captains say you could get away without a backup gen if you knew what you were doing. Throw in a small wind gen and a solar panel your pretty much gas free. (small generator of fuel cell system for emergency backup).

The weight savings of removing/making the fuel tanks smaller (gas is not quite 6lbs/gal). The electric drive systems are significantly less weight than comparable diesel. All together you have a lot of weight savings that can be afforded to other things.

 

Ocean,

Assuming the batteries they are using on board are typical of large deep cycle batteries, they are carting around something like 1200lbs of batteries (12 batteries*100lbs) 1200 lbs of fues comes out to about 200 gallons. Since an efficient sailboat should get at least 1gallon/hour at 10kn, that gives a range of around 2000 miles. Or most of the way across the Atlantic for the same amount of fuel.

Instead this boat was running a regenarative motor across the Atlantic charged by the motion through the water, then reusing that energy to drive the boat faster up waves, and through slight lulls. This sounds great, but in reality it is at best a perpetual motion machine. In reality however the amount of energy the system stores can never be greater than the amount of energy it took from the system. So instead of using the boat speed for regenarative energy production they would have been better just going faster when they could, and going slower when the conditions demanded. This would have resulted in a faster overall trip time, as well as reduced maintenance from running two engines non-stop across the Atlantic (Notice the amount of repairs necessary when they arrived). Like most 'hybrid' technologies this is nothing more than a pipe dream trying to sell itself as somehow special, when in reality it is a lot of fluff that doesn't achieve much.

The fundamental reality of electrical propulsion on boats is that batteries do not have a high enough energy density to be practical replacements from diesel. If at some time new battery technology does show up all of this miht be profitably explored, but it doesn't today.

 

Stumble,

The issue (to me anyway) is the $6000, 300+pound motor. Plus the $4000 200lb+ genset. The 200 gallons of fuel at $800 and 1100 pounds (200X5.5). Plus more maintenance. For a complete diesel system your looking at $12000+ to complete that maiden voyage across the Atlantic and back.

electric motors - 2 x $1000 = $2000
controller - 1x 850 = $850
batteries 12x $170 = $2040
misc = $1000

That leaves almost $6000 for solar & wind - about $3500.

So were just under $10K or $2k ahead. At this point if you want supplemental power you can:
- small portable gas gen for $500 or less.
- small fuel cell stack kit 500W - $2500, 900L hydride storage $1000, hydrogen production electrolyzer $3000. (and these costs will decrease with economies of scale).
- buy a stationary bike, hook up an alternator, and pedal. $300 (less if you shop used auto parts)


Even if I have to spend the extra $2-5K for the fuel cell system in my book I'm way ahead:
- No/almost no future fuel costs other than budgeting for maintenance (lower than diesel), repairs, and eventual repalcement of parts. This is no different than a diesel wearing out.
- Near zero carbon footprint.
- Quieter motor
- No smelly diesel exhaust

One technology by itself won't work, but a combination I believe will.

No these systems aren't perfect yet and yes you can you get away without a genset on smaller boats. Someone on the electric boat forum mentioned that they thought one of the members bought one of these Lagoon boats, and according to that poster there were still some issues to be worked out.

They swore up and down the earth was flat and man would never fly.

 

Ocean, two points.

1) The boat you are refrencing has a large diesel generator to provide power to the boat. So add back the fuel, plumbing, and cost of the generator. While I disagree with the numbers you provide using them we are now at the same price as a diesel installation.

2) You completely missed the point about the design trying to get free energy. These guys didn't use their engines across the Atlantic, they sailed across at a slower average speed than they would have had they taken out the electric engines and just sailed.

 

Stumble,

you know Captains word is law!
In this special case it seems the Captain rules the law of physics also.

Dreamer,
Apart from being as ignorant as all your predecessors here on this topic, your calculation is in accordance with your board handle. A dream!

I wonder how you managed to read previous threads and posts (you found some contradictions as mentioned), but missed the information provided there in abundance. Especially those on physics and prices.

Ask yourself why the Lagoon CAT is not longer available with the so named (it was never one) Hybrid system.

And did you miss the Touranor desaster? Crawling the open seas at 4 -5kn in the bright sunlight?

Do some legwork (or read what the experts have written here) and come back in 20 years.

Regards
Richard

 

A little bit of digging showes exacally the problem with all hybrid systems that attempt to store electrical power (Diesel-electrics are a different system and have their own problems).

The energy density for
1) Diesel 37.3MJ/L
2) Best battery money can buy 1.8MJ/L (A LiSulpher battery not yet in manufacturing)
3) Standard Lead/Acid battery .36MJ/L

So to replace your diesel tanks with batteries would require 20.7 times the amount of volume currently dedicated if you use the LISulpher or 103.6 times the volume if you use lead/acid batteries.

Of course batteries weigh significantly more by volume than diesel fuel does....

That Lead acid battery specs give it an internal volume of 673.31cubic inches or 2.9 gallons at a weight of 50lbs. Doing the math, the battery weighs in at 17.24 lbs/gallon compared to 7.1lbs/gallon for diesel fuel.


Doing the math here leads to this result.

1) to replace a 500 gallon diesel tank with batteries we would need:

a) 500gallons *7.1lbs/gallon =3550lbs for full diesel tanks tanks
b) 500 gallons diesel *103.6 to convert to necessary volume of batteries * 17.24 lbs/gallon of batteries=893,032lbs of batteries.


There is your problem people, the necessary volume and weight of batteries it takes to replace diesel fuel is too high. Primarily because diesel is an exceptionaly dense source of energy.

 

When the calculation is done exact, it is much worse Stumble. Just because one cannot calculate the stored energy as available!

But that was all said, calculated and measured so many times here, it makes no sense to repeat that every other week, because another dreamer comes up with the same premature phantasy. (and I doubt this one is a new member, more likely just a new board handle)

Regards
Richard

 

Yes it did have a large generator, but that was 7 years ago, and they had no other alt source (PV, Wind). Today you can pull that large generator out and use a smaller computer automated cell along with wind & PV (at least that's my working theory) to start and stop a diesel gen for on demand loads or charging. Doing that with diesel you would lose all the extra energy going to the starter. A fuel cell is basically instant on, open the solenoid to start the hydrogen flow and you have electricity. (The price for the fuel cell and storage came from fuelstore.com, and the price I was quoted for the hydrolyzer was $2900 euros for a 100L/hr unit, @ 99.999% purity, though that particular cell was alkaline based and requires you to carry a jar of K+ pellets (catalyst that makes the production much faster).


Don't know if I would agree with your second statement completely, and I don't have enough sailing experience to argue. However if it means I can cross an ocean for nothing more than the same basic investment as diesel I'm in. Besides on the days with a good breeze couldn't you crank up the juice and motor for a couple hours to make up some time? You can even convert a propane stove to run off hydrogen. If you go with a hydrolyzer that saves the O2 it produces you can use that for a blow torch if you find it necessary while underway.


As the old statement goes, speed costs....how fast do you want to go.

I did get a response from the person who bought the first electric lagoon. You can see the thread here:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/electricboats/message/16198

 

It will never end........................


Where would you put sufficient area of PV panels?

What do you reckon a windgen provides (apart from severe drag)?

Where do you store the energy? Batteries? How many tonnes do you calculate for a 25kw motor?

Since when do Cat´s handle ballast well?

What do you do on a calm, cloudy daywhen you run into a risky situation?

Why did Nordhavn not only give up to install the most sophisticated system, on their larger boats, but ripped them out at immense cost?

All well handled here at least 20 times. All asked and answered by pro´s in their field. Nothing new, nothing worth to re-dream.

Hybrid on seagoing boats does not exist, period.

Although I fear the whitepaper I attached, will probably encourage you even more, it might be of interest for other readers to understand the basics of battery handling and other el. related issues on a yacht.

Regards
Richard

 

Apex,

I appreciate your reply and healthy skeptcism, but I will keep working/dreaming. When (not if ) I get a system working you have a formal invite.

The fuel cell, parts are all available, cost and efficient integration is the only real issue.

Presently off the shelf 1kW system is $4000, hydrolyzer 2900 euros , how long of back up do you want for that emergency? That 1kW stack is using hydrogen at 14 L/min, 900L hydride storage tank is $1K. That's 64min of run time or 1kWh per bottle. They are pretty small and light for their size so weight isn't an issue. If you opt for high pressure storage you can go with a more traditional pressure tank and save $$, but you gain weight in comparison. Also keep in mind when you do have good sun, wind, etc your producing and storing your fuel onboard at 100L/hr. Personally I would probably opt for two 500w cells for some redundancy. And these costs will scale down overtime.

Besides the 300-500W of solar panels already installed on a lot of for sale boats, with a little modification you could run some of these up the mast on those windless days then roll them back up.

http://www.xunlight.com/products/availability/

or

http://www.altestore.com/store/Sola...erFilm-Inc-18W12V-Thin-Film-Solar-Panel/p706/

Another company is looking at "inkjet printing" of PV panels. These could be formed to about any shape and would be at significant savings over current. The entire exterior of your mast could be covered with molded PV.

The drag issue of the generator isn't one from my perspective, plenty of boats for sale already have them integrated. One company even makes a drag behind (drone I believe) generator that you can also hang from the rigging when the sail is down (say at mooring). Don't want the drag take it down.

Apparently Lagoon isn't out of the electric business either, and the size system I'm speaking of here is for something using up to 50hp diesel. (5-12kW motor)
( http://www.electricmarinepropulsion.org/Pages/NewsFrom_L500_sale.html )

Like you said it may be premature, but that just means the opportunity still lies ahead! And some sort of small gas gen (10gal max storage) for extended emergency use might be a smart idea (I've even got a potential solution that could replace this). Yes all this adds up to a lot of gas, but if your having to re-power anyway why not (once proven)? Unless you never use the boat (and even then if you can keep your boat at home you could plug it in and help power your home).

I may be overly optimistic with the size of the fuel cell but that's just another challenge to work out.

My point is not to be the fastest or cheapest, but a boat that from a power standpoint you can cross oceans with and not go broke from fuel costs. Until something takes over oil based fuels with continue to rise in cost. Hydrogen will continue to drop in cost. You cant brew gas at home but you can hydrogen.

I can't be too far off, after all there is already a patent on this basic system. And yes I am new here, not just a name changer.

 

Ok Ocean here are some basic physics realities for you...

1) The net energy of a system must always remain constant.
2) Conversion of energy from one type to another always has some loss

Starting here, we can extrapolate a few things:

1) Assuming every system involved is 90% efficient (much higher than real life, but why not)

When the regenerative motors convert 1000Joules of forward energy into electrical power we are left with 900joules remaining. When we store this in the battery we can only store 810joules. Later when we need to use this energy we first conver the 810 stored joules into 729joules which converts to 656 when applied through the engines into the props. This ~40% drop in available energy is the problem all regenerative systems face when they are using power that otherwise could be used directly for propulsion.

This type of system works on a car briking system since otherwise the excess energy gets bled off as heat. But on boats no such comparable exists.

Now it doesn't really matter what your storage device is, the reality is that for every 1000J you put inot a system you can only get out 656J (assuming an unrealistically high 90% efficiency at each step). So yes we can do what you suggest and apply regenerative cruise power to a boat, but why? Instead of storing 656J for later use, we are better to just use the full 1000J now.




You go on to mention a number of unproven technologies that have never to my knowledge been used succesfully on a boat. Such as fuel cells, and hydrolizers. The problem here is that you are stuck in the same boat as a battery. The energy density while higher than for a battery is not even in the range of diesel fuel, plus you have the added problems of storing either extremely high preassure gasses, or extremely cold gasses, or a mixture of the two. In addition both of your necessary fuel sources (technically oxygen is a catalyst) are highly flamable, and oxygen is highly toxic in high concentrations. This leaves you with needing a huge amount of volume dedicated to storing highly dangerous substances with no advantage over diesel, except that it is not diesel.

You of course seem to believe that you can generate enough power through turbines (water or air), or solar cells to simply generate the gass as you need it. This is technically possible (by which there is no theoretical scientific basis for why it couldn't work), however the power generation of even the most advanced solar cells, combined with the largest wind farm that could be placed wouldn't equate to but a small percentage of the amount of power needed to power a vessel of any size, for any range.

And you assertion that there are patents on things does nothing to prove their viability in the near future. The US Patent Office currently recogniozes patents on things are far looking as inter-stellar space ships. Though I doubt one will be built in the next twenty years.



Fundamentally the problem is the same. Unlike land based applications ships must carry substantially all of the power they need for the cruise duration with them when they leave the dock. Whatever form that energy is in production is not a reasonable option (excepting governments with nuclear reactors). The current options we have are diesel, gasoline, and batteries, but at the moment batteries are not energy dense enough to work. Gasoline is highly explosive and dangerous. Leaving only diesel (and buker fuels of course) as a realistic option.

The moment you show me the math even on how a self sufficient vessel of ~60 foot can travel 200 miles a day for 10 days on any power other than hydrocarbons, radio-isotopes, and sails I will be happy to help find the money necessary to build a prototype. By whatever means you choose, including solar generation, fuel cells, regenerative thrust, vibration generators, whatever. If you can simply work out the numbers I know of multiple places to find the cash. But the technology is not currently advanced enough to make this a reality.